Digital Media Format War 2.0 is About to Begin

Everyone is going crazy with excitement over the new iPods and price drop on the iPhone. I can’t help but be excited about yet another quality craftsmanship conjured by the demigod artists at Cupertino but I know it’s not too much of an advancement when you really think about it and Dave Winer agrees. For what it’s worth, Apple under promised and over delivered once again at it’s hip-A-list-only media event today. With all of the excitement, it’s understandable everyone hasn’t put enough thought into the ramifications of the first true next gen iPod.

By far, the biggest announcement was that the 8Gig $599.00 dollar iPhone was getting a 30 percent price drop, and will now only set back your gadget budget by 399.00. I fully believe this is mostly in response to somewhat poor adoption, and a somewhat lackluster response (for an Apple product that is! No Keyboard!!!) but mostly because they know a monster is coming and they want to capitalize on the holiday market before the CEDIA announcements come in less than a week and before the real competitors show up. Gphone anyone?

The point of this post.

That’s not the point of this post right now though. I was hoping for some better insight when I read Saul Hansell of The New York Times’ analysis about the future of digital entertainment devices but everyone on Techmeme scene is missing some key points about the future of the music player.

What does it take to make a successful music player in tomorrow world? Upnp or in Apple’s case, a highly secret competitor to DLNA.

DLNA, or the Digital Living Network Alliance is an international, cross-industry collaboration of consumer electronics. The goal of the standard is the establishment of a wired and wireless interoperable network of personal computers, consumer electronics and mobile devices in the home and on the road, enabling a seamless environment for sharing new digital media and content services. The standard was founded by Sony and Intel in 2003, but is currently made up of 8 board members, HP, Intel, Matsushita, Microsoft, Nokia, Phillips, Samsung, and Sony.

Notice I didn’t say Apple, and notice I didn’t say Google. While the first format was battled over AAC vs. WMA and was a file format war, the second battle will be DLNA vs. something Apple just announced and is testing out with Starbucks today. Upnp Allows for the streaming of media to various parts of the home and is supported by every single hardware manufacture that you will see at CEDIA this year. Steve Jobs did not call the Apple TV a hobby for no reason, he intends to let the iPod be the controller for whole house audio/video, and I am praying that he doesn’t make all of the quality investments out there of other people in the home obsolete.

It’s a shame not too many people read this blog, i was talking about this months and months ago, I have an inside source (not at Apple) that let me in on that fact that Apple is indeed working on whole house Audio/Video.

I sure hope Apple embraces DLNA, but surely I’ll understand if they don’t, afterall, that just means we have to go out and buy all new high end preamps, power amps and all of my other home gear. That will help with Apple’s recent stock price problems.

Disclaimer: I’m a busy guy, I wrote this in less than 15 minutes so there are probable mistakes, I’ll try to correct ASAP.

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Technorati tags: iPod, iPod 6.0, Digital Media Format War, Digital Media Format War 2.0, itunes, iPod Classic, iPod touch, Apple Price Drop, iPod price drop, iPhone price cut, DLNA, uPnp, Cedia, Sau Hansell, NYT, Whole House Audio, Whole House Video

Votes against OOXML = Votes Against Choice

The ISO has voted to reject Microsoft’s OOXML as a standard. The blogosphere is having a conversation about it currently and I’m hoping that the primary reason for this is to give Microsoft a good incentive to address any legitimate concerns.

I can’t think of a better supporting example of why Microsoft should be able to have its own open documents format standardized than to use Macromedia’s SWF format as an example. I can write a tool that publishes to SWF, but I can’t integrate features into the formats upcoming revisions until those specifications are released. Being a huge lover of opensource and Linux I feel very alone on this issue. All companies should be required to make their documents open so that others can read and write to them, but none should be required to lose control of the format in which the tool is forced to write.

It is not fair of a government that both forces Microsoft to publish to an open ISO standard + forces the company to use another company’s standard. Microsoft wrote the book on office publishing and it clearly deserves to be able to produce its own paper.

Macromedia opened up its SWF format so that others could write programs which could output to it but there was not a single company on earth better able to utilize it than Macromedia (now Adobe) itself. There have been many tools which ended up complementing the Macromedia (Adobe) suite.

The same people, who have rallied against Microsoft to make its websites work in Firefox, are now being a bit of hypocrite when they try to say that OOXML is evil. What we users want is choice, and just because you don’t like Microsoft gives you no right to try and say Microsoft wanting its own standard is unethical or an attempt to undermine any other companies’ ability to compete.

Governments who require an ISO approved document format will now suffer because Microsoft will not take advantage of any of the advanced features of ODF in its office format which will be in use in the majority of scenarios. Microsoft will continue to improve and work with countries but everyone is upset and spreading FUD about the whole affair. I am a huge OSS advocate and I’ve never seen the community spread as much FUD as it is right now. There should be more than one format; opportunities will be created by those who seek to implement unique tools which help both Microsoft Office, and Open Office.

The bottom line, I always loose respect for companies and organization that drop the lowest common denominator of what’s acceptable in ethics, and I don’t like seeing the vast majority of the blogosphere completely and utterly confused about an issue completely because they’ve heard so much nonsense about the real issues. Microsoft is being flamed at the stake for getting talking folks into supporting its open standard. The truth of the matter is, Microsoft is making and improving OOXML so that other document programs can read and write to it, if you want to put Microsoft out of business in the Office arena write a better damn program and don’t whine to international bodies and tech enthusiasts, because some of us are smarter than that. Let’s face it, if the supporters of ODF were interested in true interoperable document solutions, they would urge Microsoft to join ODF by giving them a fair amount of control over it so that their future office revisions could take advantage of the format as much as Google, Sun, Linux, and IBM’s suites could. Instead, they are using government policy to spread FUD in order to somehow give them the upper hand but I think the entire thing will backfire, considering Microsoft will not be under as much government scrutiny soon. Microsoft has been trying to be a corporate citizen much more than a lot of other companies lately. I don’t want to argue so I’ll just say that no one company is perfect, and you can’t hold Microsoft accountable for the actions of one employee in all situations.

Update: I’ve been reading a blog called No OOXML(tiny bit biased on the subject) and they feel there is some evil in Microsoft’s format. I’ll read up on it and then I’ll re assess the situation. I don’t understand why ODF cares as long as there are ODF to OOXML converters? What I’ve heard up until now is that there is too much documentation, and also that there is not enough documentation, for instance how to save to Word 95 format? Who cares again? These machines are all running Linux now anyway!

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Technorati tags: ODF, OOXML, Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems, JAVA, Google Docs and spreadsheets, SWF, Open Office, Star Office, Open Source, ISO, ISO Rejection, ISO Rejections

Google Wiki: Google is deploying its Microsoft Office/OS CashCow Killers (MOCK)

Where is this going?

First of all, I think MOCK is the best acronym for a way to describe what it takes to bring down Microsoft. I’m not saying I want to see Microsoft taken down, I just think  MOCK is pretty ironic in at least two ways. Google is very serious in its intention to enter the enterprise by storm. Wiki means rapidly in the native Hawaiian language, and taking down the Microsoft Monopoly would put a lot of Google folks in Hawaii in a hurry.

They (Google) have some stealth underwater nuke subs that haven’t been picked up on radar (I’ve got my scuba gear on for you readers!), as well as well as some that are getting ready to surface. They are being very mum about the entire ordeal, especially, the Gphone and how it will bring them massive income.

I believe that Google’s enterprise strategy is to do the same thing to Microsoft, as Microsoft did to Netscape, in as much as they will make quality replacements for Microsoft’s cash cows for very cheap and will/might supported by advertising, until the worlds IT managers have no excuse to not switch over to Google or a newly created Microsoft life line. I know, you are probably laughing right now. Advertising has the ability to subsidize quality software, just as it has for quality entertainment (and not so quality) for the last 100 years.

The Advent of the Wiki

A wiki is the most productive online documentation/communication and collaboration model known to man. The Wiki-in many ways replaced the need for utilizes like PHPBB. The features in a wiki were the first to make the online bulletin board obsolete as a support tool. I expect the Google Wiki to integrate viral features which make Google Wiki even more useful to the point that it will facilitate communities further making online bulletin boards unpopular unless they start becoming more advanced, and quick. Even so, it’s tough to get people excited about the latest PHPBB, and even harder to get people excited about a proprietary online BB. …I digress.

After acquiring Jotspot 11 months ago, Google has been a busy bee. Tony Ruscoe at Blogoscoped has posted some information which details on how there is now currently a disabled login page to the new Google Wiki Service. Combine this with the fact that Google’s PowerPoint competitor and Google Wiki are most likely are to concurrently demonstrated at next week’s Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

      ( One of the latest Pre-Google Jotspot Builds )

 

Related:

Zoli Erdos connecting the dots by showing what he thinks Google’s been up to with the Google Wiki:

· It could provide for much better document management than the current Docs &­ Spreadsheets UI. 

· It overlaps with Page Creator, also with the simplified version found in Google Groups – in fact Groups which is no longer just email lists but a rudimentary collaboration platform and Jotspot could very well be merged / integrated.

· Finally Jotspot tried to provide primitive applications (spreadsheet, calendar, Etc) all if which have a better Google counterpart, so one would hope they will be replaced, too.

Great thoughts Zoli, and perhaps the most thinking going on that I’ve read on the subject: Modded for interesting! =)

My Conclusion

 With the calendaring app, notes app and all of the other goodies Jotspot has rolling, let’s not forget they had that developer’s corner that was just taking off. I’m hoping for an API, and I’m also hoping that the presentation app takes advantage of either some killer DHTML or Flash. More important than that even, is Google is missing a real application for brainstorming ideas, much like Microsoft Visio does so well. I’d like to be able to see someone put together the first social Visio, and if it would become mainstream and useful, you might be looking at the most rapid way to go from thought to deck to business plan in the industry. I’m also surprised that Google hasn’t started integrating its online offerings via Eclipse or at least a Java IDE for their Phone. I’ll save that for another post but it would be cool to get a really cool Google IDE Google Web Toolkit or at least a major upgrade to the suite.

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Technorati tags: Google Wiki, Google, Google System, JotSpot, Google Presentation, Google Enterprise, Google Enterprise Strategy, MOCK, Microsoft Office/OS CashCow Killer, Netscaped, Gphone, Wiki, Office 2.0 Conference, Microsoft Blue Screened

Is The New York Times becoming technology irrelevant?

Recently the New York Times has had a slew of articles which show an ever increasing lack of understanding when it comes to technology. It’s either that or the fact that they love their Macs so much that they never use Windows or Office and simply don’t understand relevant strategy, or even quite understand web 2.0. I don’t want to bash the company, surely, it’s a news source that I read along with the Wall Street Journal. Those the two basic papers that I read all of the time without question. There are a few others from Chicago and DC that I will read on occasion.

Yesterday in an article about iScrybe, Michael Fitzgerald of the NYT said, in an otherwise informative (to NYTimes readers) article about iScrybe, that:

"It (iScrybe) also works offline, something that Outlook and other existing programs cannot do."

I wont go into all of the inaccuracies that I’ve read lately but I’m starting to wonder, how much at a disadvantage are reporters who use only OSX going to be at when writing about a technology world that is mostly dominated by Google and Microsoft–not Apple, and Is The New York Times becoming technology irrelevant.

Today, John Markoff of the NYT’s claimed that:

"Microsoft’s new approach is in many ways a mirror image of the strategy used during the 1990s in defeating Netscape Communications when the start-up threatened Microsoft’s desktop dominance. Microsoft tried to tie the Internet to Windows by bundling its Internet Explorer Web browser as an integral part of its desktop operating system."

The first thing I must tell John is, "John, you must have been in a cryogenic freeze for the last five year to even draw this parallel. Microsoft bundled IE 4 directly into it’s operating systems, forced all operating system level API and all URL protocols link directly to IE, so that even if a user wanted to use Netscape, they constantly ended up using both browsers in an age where browsers still cost money, and Microsoft was making money of off it’s–at the time–near monopoly. He Goes on:

Today, that strategy has been flipped with the growing array of Web services that are connected to Windows. But the new approach, which the company refers to as “software plus services,” is once again beginning to draw industry charges of unfair competition from competitors.

and

Last week, for example, Microsoft executives were put on the defensive after the company’s efforts to gain international adoption for a Microsoft-designed document format known as Open Office XML, led to charges of vote-buying in an international standards vote in Sweden.

You have to seriously be kidding me. Yes, this was erroneous by Microsoft, and might cost them dearly in their race to establish Open XML as an office standard, it was a mistake by a lower ranking official at Microsoft most likely trying to hit his internal goal targets but the Microsoft you compare them to exported it’s Office formats to a type which was completely unreadable and writable by any competitors program.

All Microsoft is really wanting to do here is control there own open Interoperable ISO standard, and giving the fact that they have invented what an office suite for all competitors (yes, even our lovely open office, Thunderbird and Koffice suites are highly influenced by Office) should look like over the last decade.

I feel they have every right to own their own document format which is completely compatible with any distribution of Linux that currently exists. Sure, Novel’s OpenSUSE has it working by default in it’s upcoming OpenSUSE 10.3 but the bits are opensource and so each and every Linux distribution can use it to their own advantage.

The fact that IBM, who owns it’s own proprietary suite, has embraced the Opensource community more is irrelevant. IBM has only done so because it’s wants to weaken Microsoft in as many areas as possible. I think it’s perfectly fine if both formats are standards, int his fashion, no one company owning an office suite and force another to change its office suite based on it’s lack of control of the format it writes too. Since they are both open, consumers will benefit no matter what because the two formats will have converters and readers available in the form of add-ons shortly after a new version of each spec is released.

Michael Arrington even points out that the NYT’s is considerably off. Michael is a highly motivated, thoughtful, intelligent and well connected Valley power broker and blogger with a lot of bloggers writing for his network of blogs. None of them would consider posting garbage like this.

I don’t want to bash anyone but I stated years ago that one of the primary goals I was going to try to accomplish via this blog is to point out when misinformation is spread on a mass scale and to try my best in the average of 10 min a blog posting, that I can. And so the point of this article is to point out that I can not understand how the NYT can say that Microsoft’s IE Anti competitive behavior is in any way similar to Microsoft trying to fast track their OPEN standard.

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Technorati tags: The New York Times, NYT, Michael Arrington, iScribe, Michael Fitzgerald, John Markoff, Windows Live Installer Thingy Coming This Week.

Gpay + GPS + GPhone enables Pay Per Action/Sale advertising

 Everything is coming together for Google it seems at the last minute. We are two weeks away from a Rumored but "Confirmed iPhone." Perfect timing for an application that has dates from the 2005 Era on it. Patrick Altolf on SEO optimize has an excellent find. Right when I had imagined Gcheckout could quite possibly be merged with Visa to enable local payments Google reveals how it will take this market by storm.

All of the peices are falling together for a Google Advertising Monopoly sooner rather than later. If Google has Gpay + advertising on a Gphone + GPS enabled ads, then they will most likely be able to take on the emerging Mobile GPS enabled Advertising era by storm.

 

Update, Om Malik over at GigaOM has some juicy "facts" about the Gphone. Om isn’t going to lie about this stuff…

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Technorati tags: Gpay, Google Local Advertising, Gphone, GPS, Patrick Altolf, SOE Optomize, Google Master Plan

Has Microsoft Live Mail Been Hacked?

I dont know but I’m logging into my live mail and this is what it looks like? Very odd! I even tried Internet Explorer!

:

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Technorati tags: Windows Live Mail, Live Mail, Hacking, Microsoft Live Mail

Gnews + Adsense + Gphone + Gcheckout + GPS = Google Advertising Monopoly

This article is not meant to be a catchy headline that starts a controversy about the potential ethics of recent moves by Google to shake down Newspaper sources as just another respective on the news. Web 2.0 is a pyramid, where the sources of the news and exclusives get the most eyeballs. I believe Google has a renewed focus on Google news because they want more newspapers who have found a backup source of income to die. Just like Microsoft wanted Netscape to die. The reality of the matter is that there are three types of advertising, and an emerging form of advertising that I will talk about below will I strongly believe –and will provide clues as to why–will be much more lucrative than all of the previous three combined.

When I read about interesting revaluations like Google signing long term deals with the wire services themselves, I realize that the strategy they are about to reveal and execute. Slowly, the moves of Google will finally show all newspapers that Google is planning on making their survival very difficult.

They also want to suction as much money out of the radio advertising budget and the print advertising budget so that there is yet even less competition for Google. Once they have over 90 percent of the market, they will increase prices as it’s the only thing left to do in order to expand their income, and by that time, there will practically no one other power house advertising shop that is worth mentioning.

Do No Evil. Driving your competitors out of business is not only legal, but it’s ethical (unless you are in Japan), taking steps to maintain that monopoly, or using it to enter other markets is what is evil. Let’s go through the nitty gritty. Here are the forms of advertising. Keep in mind, there is a finite amount of cash in advertising, and the only way to grow the entire finite amount of money in advertising is the increase the methods by which advertising generates revenue. I’ll show you how Google is going to do that in a moment.

1. Print advertising. This type of advertising is your local ads printed in local papers, as well as quasi national papers like the New York Times and the WSJ. Advertisers are spending less and less money here on targeted ads–money that Google never sees, unless it’s a part of one of the ads that results from one of the deals Google recently struck with many newspapers.

2. TV/Radio advertising: This type of advertising is the second fastest shrinking form of advertising, 5 years ago, it was perhaps the best form of advertising, and although it’s not in nearly as much trouble as print, it also represents advertising dollars that Google doesn’t get.

3. Internet Advertising; Search powered pay per click advertising is as of right now the most lucrative type of advertising, not only to the advertising agencies and Google, but also to the customers, who get the best return on investment for their dollars. The reason for this is most of the time a person clicks on Dog Medication, or Dog Flea treatments, or execute queries like this, they are either looking to learn more about such items, but are most likely looking to shop for said items. Advertisers like advertising which turns into direct sales, especially when those sales far surpass what is paid to the advertising provider.

4. GPS enabled advertising:  Even if not combined with fantastic Google Local Search (it will be), it is still a much more potentially lucrative form of advertising simply because most people still spend the vast majority of their discretionary income via their automobiles. This form of advertising is also much better than anything else, and Google is in the position to totally annihilate and dominate this market. It will open the advertising market to furniture outlets, as well as manufacturers of heavy equipment. It will change the way some of the largest companies in the world advertise. Namely, Bestbuy, Walmart,Target,Costco, and so on.

5. Enter Google Checkout, Gphone + Google Maps/Earth in the Car: I believe Google will sign a major deal with one of the major credit card companies in which they will be able to combine transactions with Google Checkout with let’s say Visa. Every purchase that is made via this card will be tracked by Google, users will get great deals, and Google will make so much damn money that they will destroy all advertising competitors in so short a time that it will make what Microsoft did to the software industry look like a silly game of ping pong.

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Technorati tags: Google Advertising Monopoly, Gphone, Google, Google News, Google Print Advertising, Google Radio Advertising, Microsoft, Do No Evil, Google Wire Services, Google Checkout, Google Maps, Google Earth

Storm Worm is the most powerful and dangerous Supercomputer

On January 17, 2007, a little over 7 and a half months ago, a Trojan horse dubbed Storm Worm was launched and began attacking Windows computers in mostly Europe and the United States. 15 days later, Storm Worm had accounted for 8% of all infections globally.

Researchers were somewhat marveled and frightened at the spectacle. A Symantec security research associate, Amado Hidalgo said:

 "During our tests we saw an infected machine sending a burst of almost 1,800 emails in a five-minute period and then it just stopped."

Storm Worm is an engineering marvel. Brian Krebs at the Washington Post recently said:

"If we assume the average Storm worm victim machine falls within this range, the Storm cluster has the equivalent of one to 10 million 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 processors with one to 10 million petabytes worth of RAM."

 

It’s also engineered to be very difficult to stop. Storm Worm uses links to infected websites to quickly spread in a viral fashion. It uses false but catchy headline news stories to draw its victims into clicking on a link which will then run a series of exploit tests. The headlines range from phrases like, "Saddam Hussein alive!" to open ended nonsense like "Re: Your Text"

These exploits are updated all the time, and represent a huge hole in the fabric of security, as it’s not illegal to sell an exploit to the highest bidder. Making the situation more problematic, Storm Worm uses P2P technology, and doesn’t have a central server which would be traditionally taken out of commission by security engineers. Signature based detection is almost useless against the Storm Worm as it self modifies every 30 minutes.

This botnet represents a danger on the Internet that we have not ever seen before. To imagine a process which is out there updating, improving, expanding, avoiding detection with enough raw horsepower to undermine serious encryption mechanisms, launch network attacks on a global scale, and should control of this monster be sold to a group with more evil intentions, there could be severe damage which could undermined the the open and free nature of the future of the Internet itself.

Technorati tags: Storm Worm, Super Computers, Internet Threats, Virus, Trojans, Security, P2P